Triumph

A Story by Kheya

This is a vignette about the last night spent by a young Indian revolutionary, who has been sentenced to death in his jail cell.

The hours tick away.
Dusk dims down to eventide. Eventide gives way to the reign of the night. Dinner comes, pushed under the flap, and makes a screeching noise, the noise of the contempt which scorches his skin in bright daylight, when hundreds of eyes bear down upon him. The comforting contempt he would be privy to when the next east grows rosy.
He glances at the food and as usual, rejects it as vermin, contaminated by the hands of the whites. He looked down at himself, with his upper half unclothed. His emaciated and grimy body, rough, calloused hands, matted hair, with dirt under his fingernails.
He looked down at his dark hands, which used to shine golden in the afternoon sun…stretched lazily in the inviting green fields.
He laughed to himself.
A bitter laugh.
“Dirty Indian n****r”, that’s how the whites acknowledged him with noxious scorn evident in their tones.
As he lay in that state, half formed images obfuscated his mind. Long-forgotten memories that had been carefully tucked away under the careful veil of the subconscious.
Blood, crimson blood, had graced his touch. Closing his eyes, he remembered the general’s horrified expression as he slit his throats. All those bloodless faces looking up at him, as he mercilessly slit their throats, all the fire seemed to flow intravenously, manifesting themselves through his bloody, dripping dagger. The society was in dire need of funds. They couldn’t afford the shiny auto 9mm IA. A dagger it would have to be.
As he heard the petty little handcuffs chaining his crimson, divinely throbbing hands, he had laughed. A cruel, bitter, mirthless laugh, throbbing with the accumulated pain, the misery as he watched his mother and sisters lose their carefully preserved dignity, powerless against those whites, who were “true to the cause of justice.”
He smiled as he relived the feeling of the warm wetness at his fingertips. Tomorrow, his neck would be strung up, to be proudly displayed to the other “filthy n*****s” out there.
At the thought of his sentence, the delicate, fragile child in him cried out in agony, distress and fear.
For he was young, a freshly sown seed on the soil of mother India, about to be uprooted like a worthless weed. How does a mid-teen reconcile himself to the thought of death?
He had no one to hold on to, no comfort to be sought, except a quivering exaltation- he would die a martyr, a true son of mother India.
He had given up the greatest gift bestowed upon him for his motherland, and yes! He would do it again.
And again.
And again.
He thought about his mother and in his heart, he thanked her, for he had sacrificed the very centre of her existence. As he lay, his heart cried out in apprehension of the dawn and yet, he felt a warmth engulfing him as he thought of what he would be called- “শহীদ”, a martyr.
He looked down at his scars, reminisces of the torture he had faced.
With childlike curiosity, he thought of how his flame would finally burn out, would it be a struggle, or would it dim down to oblivion peacefully?
Whatever the pain, this was the best way to go, he would slit more throats and be hanged any number of times when his country needed him.
As he lived through his last full moon, the mellifluous sound of a flute filtered in through the window, carrying a shred of hope, of solace, carrying the exalting promise of freedom.